The Messy Girl Feels at Home in New Delhi

by Jennifer Koiter

It’s not the mess, though the mess is inescapable, even in her posh neighborhood: haphazard stacks of discarded wood, crumbling sidewalks, piles of trash sprawling by roadschildren stepping slowly through them, searchingfor glass or old pans or copper wire,while a gray cow stares dullypast traffic, chewing and chewinga blue plastic bag.

It’s just that there’s so much of everything: so much color in the markets, piles of yellow turmericand red vermilion, colors collidingunexpectedly in salwar kameez— bright yellow, bright red, hot pink —and saris covered with mirrored sequinsand gold embroidery. So many people walking on streets, not sidewalks, skirting so many street dogsplaying or fighting or sleepingon medians, inches from so much traffic, so many men clutching the open doors of a crowded buses,or hanging halfway outof overfilled auto rickshawsor standing on street corners, drinking chai, impassively watchingthe women, who never pause, who walk with purpose, always. So many eyesand cellphone cameras trailing heras she picks her way through parks and national monuments.

Her exhaustion is finally justified.

So much pollution. It lodges in herlungs, it clogs her pores, it clings to the dry ends of her hair,to the consternation of so many aunties with so many opinions—she is breakingout again, she should buy ayurvedic soap,she should get married already, she has losttoo much weight. The aunties dish out judgments like food, often along with it: another syrupy gulab jamun, another dosa, another spoonful of dal. The chilies tingle.The sweetness is more than she can take.

She inhabits the superlative.

She learns to bargain like an Indian auntiebut usually just says fuck it, pays double,and makes a crack about white tax.

She makes friends, so many friends, bright flashes of laughter. They dissolve like mist when she tries to pull them close.She takes a lover, then another, weavingher fingers between their fingersuntil the city reclaims them.

She hadn’t realized: between the flutteringbus horns, the car horns, the flat motorcycle horns,between the neighbor’s harsh Hindi curses, the hissand screech of cats fighting, the dogs’ crepuscular cascade of howling, there is still so much silence, more than enoughfor a man to disappear.

She is the least overwhelming thing in Delhi. There is so much to long for, her throat dryin the dry Delhi heat. She switches on the ceiling fan and sprawls alone on her bed. A mosquito hoversjust outside the hot air’s swirl and rush,waiting to see whether she will slide one foot off the side of the bed,whether the air around her will finally settle.

Jennifer Koiter’s work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Bateau, Rock & Sling and South Dakota Review. She recently placed in Ruminate Magazine’s VanderMay Nonfiction Prize, and has been awarded a federal Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Money for Women Grant and artist residencies at ART342 and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Letter to Hannah From the Cafeteria During First Lunch at the Art School Where I Teach

by Mamie Morgan

I just want Amy Poehler to be happy, island-exiled and rich as that morning you arrived unprecisely edged in a black bathing suit and we lay

by the pool reading Neruda and when we showed up at the foot of I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her

you squealed and the belly chain that wore you round the waist blazed like sometimes here the vocalists do and

the ballerinas but never the cellists or—weird—the animation kids who carry their heroes around inside slate gray portfolios.

Anyway she’s split again, Amy, and I’m not saying—perhaps this Us Weekly article isn’t even saying—that a man has anything

to do with anything, but how about that time you schlepped the hours-long drive to my house carrying a case of cheap

pink wine and a Spanish-to-English CD stuck in your player translating You had been skinny, now you are fat, that couple is not

using protection all the way down I-95. I hid beneath the dining room table fisting hymnals of grass because the dining room table for a few

bad nights after he left lived out in the yard. Your man had ridden a double- named girl along Carolina Beach Pier like a song

nobody’s ever cared about, same place where Billy Worthen once hummed When You Were Mine thinking of another

girl while I stripped upright on a yellow towel. Back then I let just about anyone have at me. The Pope, Michelle Obama, millions of others

are readying for mass on our school television we bought so that while the student body eats their corn they can witness the closed-caption

of hell our country’s in. Back when, that pope shoveled as a bouncer in the same Buenos Aires club where someone once blew a gun up my mother’s dress.

Think of all he could’ve done and didn’t. I want to be at work on a poem when I die. The same night whitening the same trees.

I want it to be like that. Before you broke came the book you wrote and in it a son and in it the mean snow

and on hot days I carry them both around in my belly instead of you. My father’s dying, which is why I’m writing,

which is why at 11:11 I kiss the face of my iPhone to un-die him. He’s a globe, he’s a night-light in the shape of a conch, he thinks this election might kill him worse

than what’ll kill him, which is air. Which is the weight of what we keep asking of him, which is to stay alive. Which is what I’m asking of you as well. It’s all selfishness

over here, like any letter that has nothing— really—to do with the beloved. I want you alive. I want you stitching all the frayed hairs on my head

into a single smart wreath, making promises the way all girl children do when they’re alone just before a man comes in to switch off the lights.

Mamie Morgan’s poems appear in Cimarron, Four Way Review, Muzzle, Oxford American, The Carolina Quarterly and The Greensboro Review. She teaches poetry at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities.

Body Ghazal

by Asia Calcagno

The therapist asks me what feels alive, but I’m unable to respond with this body.I am bobbing up and down in this blue ocean of skin, drowning into another body.

The way I say ocean sounds like a shipwreck tangled into the algae of my skin.I say mother, and it echoes from a mirror mimicking the reflection of a shadow body.

I lie on many beds while someone shakes me alive, and I can only close my eyes.I have my mother’s scream and my own lips, but my mouth rejects this silent body.

Speak of an emptiness like this place swarming with blood and oxygen and hands.In me is a swallowed nest with every egg and feathered, flight-filled, tragic body.

I truly do not know how one divorces herself from abuse when it keeps alive the body.I was once naked on a mattress scrambling to find myself there— there as in my body.

Find is a word that swings so gently, but breaks when it stumbles out of the mouth.The mouth is where I really live, but it is hammered shut to the casket of my body.

Too much of the time, you are stuck on what is fair, the therapist says from her chair. I am my mother after he tapped me with fists, and I squeeze a dress over a bruised body.

Hello, it is me, I say practicing myself nameless as I introduce myself to myself again. The game is to move from the beginning to the end of the death that happened in my body.

Asia Calcagno’s poems appear in Learn Then Burn 2: This Time It’s Personal (Write Bloody, 2014), Poetry and The Golden Shovel Anthology (Arkansas, 2017). She received the Benjamin T. Marshall Poetry Prize and the Charles B. Palmer Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She is an MFA student at Bennington College.

Wrecking Wrens

by Tara Bray

Each year I wait for the wrecking wren, the plainestof its breed and known for overtaking nests of other birds, and for the male’s philandering. It’s easy to resent its needless needling of others’ eggs, and yet its repertoire of song lights up the yard. Considering only half of them survive, they get a pass. This year another pair’s moved into my house that hung silent in the trees for weeks.Today a male flies in a worm-wad, packs out the fecal sack. Every two minutes the parents feed what’s new. I watch them come and go all morning, quiet as an open door, early nestlings not yet frenzied up with sound. Given days, I hope to see them peering out the hole in slightly rumpled bills that somehow frown. I hope what is to come is not so grim. Last year I opened their house to clear the summer mess and found two tiny spines. This year I lost a third of hair, but it raged back. After a morning swoop through fields I came home dusted with pollen and sucking small blue fruits, one part earthy dying, one part flourishing. Code it: we never last, no matter how the nature tunes us up.But while we’re here, there’s always another round of wrens that will wreck and nest and feed, and at last must rise from the dark hole for their first night in strange trees that will turn familiar and charm them into brilliant beings in the distorted order of things.

Tara Bray is the author of Mistaken For Song (Persea, 2009), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and Small Mothers of Fright (LSU, 2015). She is a recipient of a State of Nevada Individual Artist Fellowship and a Sierra Arts Foundation Literary Artist Grant.

Ode to the Night Shift

by Asia Calcagno

—after John Murillo’s “Ode to the Crossfader”

Got this flexible job

with the highest pay

got this job that will make you

break & sweat into invisibility

got this Midwestern accent that says

blue-collar That says

blue-collar black double
shifts

& blue-collar scholarship

& got this trembling hand saying

this paycheck goes

straight to my mama

Got this broken dish voice

when you spill wine

on the men in white shirts

when they ask hablas español

& say you too pretty

to have this job

so they slip you tens

and twenties make you get them

cleaner spoons On break

you run the dishwasher

for the third time

sweep the crumbs

into a tiny pile

& stare until you imagine

your own resurrection

fold the table linens

into a midnight prayer

& unbutton the uniform shirt

with slow dry fingertips

Got these uneaten hors d’oeuvres

your boss packed for you

& placed in your hands

as if an offering

as if an understanding

Got these cash tips

& tired feet overdue
bills

& you got it all from

That family of women

branching out your spine

women who pass down

iron pots & cast iron skillets

who dance over stovetops

& carry children on hips

you got this magic in you

the heat All you know

is how to serve

& serve & serve

& serve

Asia Calcagno’s poems appear in Learn Then Burn 2: This Time It’s Personal (Write Bloody, 2014), Poetry and The Golden Shovel Anthology (Arkansas, 2017). She received the Benjamin T. Marshall Poetry Prize and the Charles B. Palmer Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She is an MFA student at Bennington College.

Snapdragons

by Emily Rose Cole

i.

In the year of the wig & the blood bank, I brought sheaves of snapdragons to brighten Mama’s window, nested thembetween her untouched breakfast & the statue of Jesusshouldering a lamb. I wanted them to guard her, these gold-necked spitfires she pinched open, fingers clumsy with nausea,as I recited Psalm 23 so their gaping wouldn’t look like a scream. I wanted them tongued & clawed. I wanted them snappingthe biopsy needle in two. I wanted it not to be too late.

ii.

The night before my third MRI I filched three from a stalk in a stranger’s garden, hoarded their leafless heads beneath my pillow. For luck,I told myself, but when I lifted my head no bloomwas whole: their cheeks unhinged, lips crushed. No thunderor battering wings. Nothing but a cataclysm of petals,my dragons’ halved mouths rippling & red as marrow.

Emily Rose Cole received awards from Jabberwock Review, Ruminate Magazine and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch and Yemassee. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is currently a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

Fog Forest

by Jennifer Moore

The blue spruce is a seamstress

of dark dresses. Its needles blink.

You feel small

in your new weather.

To the north, broad hemlock;

to the south, red cedar sleeping.

You wonder where the wanderers are,

pockets full of stones, shoes full of leaves.

What does the wind do?

Blows the coat of snow from the sparrow.

And the rain?

Makes a soft monument of moss.

Before you grow old in this poem,

tip-toe past the time you touched

fingertip to fern—leave a crumb,

then drop another. Build a trail

leading back to yourself. Let deer do the work

of wandering; look for the blue

through the hole in the pine. The needle

at the heart of the tree points sky-ward.

Jennifer Moore is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (Akron, 2015), selected as the Editor’s Choice for the 2014 Akron Series in Poetry, and What the Spigot Said (High5, 2009). She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.

Safeguard

by Michele Parker Randall

One white, scored oval per box,seven across, three down—lay the pills out like a street,like the residents in the homeson the street where good things comefrom. Then into their plastic cellsincarcerate, waiting, parole no beginning, but end. Count them, mark their names, check them off. One pill, two pill,red pill, all the pretty ones go in the lunch box. Mornings and evenings fill with alabaster ballast, a dozen pale pebbles.How many can fit in one berth?Pill by pill, box by box,a neighborhood afloat, tiedand fendered. Keep at it, until all the names are gone. —one white diamond as keel,one white cylinder for trim.

Michele Parker Randall’s first book, Museum of Everyday Life, was published by Kelsay Books in 2015. A portion of her current manuscript was a finalist for the Peter Meinke Poetry Prize. She teaches at Stetson University.

The Nature of Love

by Nancy Reddy

When a man wants to learn about lovehe builds a pair of monkey mothers and places them in wire cages.

One mother’s made of metal, one of cloth.The babies love the cloth mother and cling to her,even when they nurse from metal. At first

the mothers have no faces, just milky orbs,and the babies love them better like that. Days old,a baby curls against the cloth mother’s warm base.

Each mother’s perfect in her loneliness, mute inside the watched cage. The scientists give the mothers painted eyes and mouths

and the babies turn them blank again. The babiesspin the faces back around, reach up to palmthe changeless face that first stared down at them.

The laboratory’s lined with cages. The babies touch the mothers who cannot touch them back.Lab assistants chart the times. A visiting reporter asks, What is

the nature of love? Love’s an easy word. Liars use it. So do thieves. What Harlow’s found is labor,the dumb and ceaseless work of mothering

a thing too small and new to love you back.I’d thought I’d be a better mother. When again my sleep is split by cries

it’s despair I feel, not love. I take my bodyto the baby in the dark. When I lift him from the crib he doesn’t know me

until I brush a nipple across his cheeks and lips.He roots and latches. It’s not quite love.I’m cloth and I drip milk.

We’re animals together in the night.The crib’s slats cast a shadow across both our bodies.

Nancy Reddy’s first book, Double Jinx (Milkweed, 2015), was a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series. She is the recipient of a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Reddy teaches writing at Stockton University.